Collaborative bookmarking is a growing phenomenon within the world-wide web. Users of a collaborative bookmarking site contribute to the site by associating, or “tagging” uniform resource locators (URLs) for web-accessible content with descriptive phrases and key words, or tags. A tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information (such as an internet bookmark, digital image, or computer file). This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching. Tags are chosen informally and personally by the item's creator or by its viewer, depending on the system. On a website in which many users tag many items, this collection of tags becomes a folksonomy, also known as social classification, social indexing or social tagging.
The contributions of the site users are typically displayed as a single page, random arrangement of tags commonly referred to as a tag cloud. This is exemplified by collaborative bookmarking sites such as delicious.com and flickr.com. Collaborative bookmarking sites typically allow users to explore the entire tag cloud within the site or to explore the tag clouds of individual site contributors.
Bookmarking sites allow individuals to create personal collections of bookmarks and easily share their bookmarks with others. These centrally stored collections can be accessed from a web-connected machine. These systems all have the ability to display tag clouds that represent the contributions of all of a collaborative bookmarking site's users. Tags that are explicitly entered by the user for each bookmark allow the individual user to organize and display the collection with meaningful labels. Furthermore, multiple tags allow bookmarks to belong to more than one category, a limitation of traditional hierarchically organized folders found in most web browsers. Although bookmark collections are personally created and maintained, they are typically visible to others. A number of user interface elements allow social browsing of the bookmark space. For example, user names are “clickable” links; clicking on a name reveals the bookmark collection for that user. This allows someone to get a sense of the topics of interest for a particular user. Similarly, tags are also clickable, and when selected will result in a list of all bookmarks that share that tag. This is a useful way to browse through the entire bookmark collection to see if it includes information sources of interest.
These systems also have the ability to display the relative number of contributions and/or activity of contributions by varying the weight, size, color, and style of the fonts used to display tags within a tag cloud. For example, a tag that refers to twice as much content as another tag may be shown using a larger font than the other tag.
Moreover, there are other systems, such as the Mooter search engine, that enable the automated discovery and presentation of related topics within a group of web-accessible content but these rely on automated topic discovery (topics are analogous to tags) through parsing of web content. This results in a narrow set of topics that does not represent the wide variety of viewpoints observed in a social bookmarking solution.
Corporations are beginning to deploy collaborative bookmarking technology as a means of tracking and propagating expertise within their enterprises. Examples of corporate bookmarking solutions include IBM's Dogear, and Mitre's Onomi social bookmarking system.
Collaborative bookmarking systems used in the corporate environment have proven valuable for: 1) providing research analysts with a place to share research findings; 2) fueling expertise finding and user profiling; 3) helping to form and support social networks around interest areas; 4) enhancing the value of other information retrieval and aggregation capabilities on a company's intranet; and 5) influencing or augmenting corporate subject taxonomy strategies.
By their nature, corporate tag clouds will be comprised of publicly available web content as well as content that is proprietary and confidential to the enterprise and should not be available to the general public. While there are solutions that could be potentially applied to this problem, they suffer from a number of shortcomings. HTTP servers typically enable corporations to restrict the content accessible to public users by forcing users to authenticate themselves in order to access restricted URLs. This approach is not sufficient for a collaborative tagging environment since it only restricts access to a URL once it has been returned to the user and subsequently requested. This constitutes both a security risk (users become aware of restricted content and may be able to infer information from content titles even if they are restricted from viewing the content) and a usability risk (users will become frustrated if many of the tagged URLs are inaccessible to them).
HTTP servers typically provide the ability to ‘re-write’ URLs using a relatively simple grammar. This could be used to filter or perhaps obfuscate restricted content but rewriting implementations are not generally able to rewrite the content referenced by a URL, only the URLs requested by users. This introduces the same security risk as HTTP server security.
Reverse proxy or bastion servers typically used in web single sign-on solutions also restrict access to web content. Again, these suffer the shortcoming that URLs are only restricted once they are requested by a user.
It is an object of the invention to provide a means by which public or private entities can maintain a single collaborative bookmarking site to service internal staff, business partners, and members of the public such as consumers.